Director/producer/writer Spike Lee is reprising his first feature “She’s Gotta Have It” for the small screen. The New York filmmaker is working on a comedy series, based on his 1986 tale of Nola Darling, an attractive sexually independent woman who reverses the predictable and entrenched male role of ‘player’ to the chagrin of the three suitors vying for her exclusive attention.
According to Deadline, the TV show will be a “contemporary look at the characters and will explore Lee’s unique and provocative points of view about race, gender, sexuality, relationships, and the gentrification in Brooklyn.” Lee is set to write and direct the rebooted project.
Lee first gained recognition in the film industry with “She’s Gotta Have It”, which he shot in 12 days in 1985 on a budget of $175,000. It grossed over $7million in the US alone. The movie was shot in black and white, more due to budgetary constraints than any sense of art but, far from suffering from it, was probably helped by the purity it engendered. It won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and paved the way for 1988’s “School Daze”, Lee’s take on colour prejudice within the black community represented in microcosm by a black college loosely based on Lee’s own alma mater, Morehouse; and 1989’s Oscar-nominated “Do the Right Thing”, a study of simmering racial tensions that turn to violence on a single summer day in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (aka Bed-Stuy).
“She’s Gotta Have It” starred Tracy Camilla Johns as Brooklynite Nola Darling opposite Tommy Redmond Hicks (as Jamie Overstreet), John Canada Terrell (Greer Childs) and Lee himself as the overconfident but immature Michael Jordan devotee, Mars Blackmon.
Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, has produced some 40 films and hundreds of advertisements and music videos since its humble early beginnings.
